Guides / How to spot a fake sale
Five tells that a discount badge is doing more marketing than saving.
A crossed-out price is a claim, not a fact — the retailer chose that number, and nothing forces it to reflect what the item actually sold for. Most of the time it's honest. Sometimes it isn't. Here's what to look for before you trust one.
A genuine regular price has been charged for a while — weeks, ideally months. If an item appears for the first time already "on sale," the was-price is unverifiable by definition: there's no history to check it against. This is exactly the gap price-history tracking closes — a number with no prior record behind it isn't proof of anything either way.
When "50% off" produces an oddly clean number, it's worth asking which came first — the discount, or the price. A retailer that wants to advertise a round percentage can simply set the sale price first and back-calculate a was-price that makes the maths work, rather than actually discounting from a real prior price.
Manufacturers publish a recommended retail price that almost nobody actually charges — it's a ceiling, not a market price. Using it as the was-price manufactures a discount out of a number that was never real to begin with.
If a sale genuinely represents a temporary cut from a stable regular price, the item should return to that regular price once the sale ends — and stay there for a while. An item that's back "on sale" at the same was-price within days or weeks suggests the was-price is the marketing device, not the genuine baseline.
A single blanket percentage applied across an entire, unrelated catalogue — electronics next to clothing next to homeware — is a marketing threshold chosen for the campaign, not the result of considering each item's actual cost and margin individually.
Every one of these tells requires the same piece of information to check: what has this item actually sold for over time? That's the entire premise behind MyDealDrop's Deal Score — it never reads a was-price as fact. It compares today's price against what we've genuinely recorded for that exact listing, and weights the retailer's own discount claim at only 15% of the total score for exactly this reason.